[Wgcp-whc] Hejinian's Saga/Circus coming to town

[Richard Deming]

  Dear Friends,



I wanted to send a reminder that the next session of the Contemporary  
Poetics Group will be on March 26.  We will be discussing the work of  
Lyn Hejinian, a poet whose work we have looked at on two different  
occasions in the past.  Specifically her most recent book Saga/Circus  
(there are three copies left at our mailbox of the Whitney Humanities  
Center—get them while they last!). Professor Hejinian will be reading  
at the Beicke Library on April 13 at 4 PM.  The next day (April 14)  
she will meet with us for a special session of the WGCP to her discuss  
her work.  The time and place of that discussion will be determined  
soon, so stay tuned.



A useful review of Saga/Circus by the poet Joyelle McSweeney is  
available here:



http://bostonreview.net/BR34.2/mcsweeney.php



McSweeney writes:



In Lyn Hejinian’s latest book, two long poems (but they hardly feel  
long) make short work of narrative and dismantle genre with an alert  
and damaging wit. First comes “Circus” or “Lola.” This prose piece,  
with its attention to rings, battles, payers and players, moves  
characters through a tightening, finally dismaying cycle of events.  
Next comes “Saga,” also titled “The Distance,” which applies pressure  
to two figures of continuity: the first–person speaker and the sea  
voyage. Together, these texts form a contrast of cyclicality and  
stasis and test the limits of writing as vehicle and vessel of both  
violence and knowledge.



Here is the official bio:



Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, and translator; she was born in the  
San Francisco Bay Area and lives in Berkeley. Published collections of  
her writing include Writing is An Aid to Memory, My Life, Oxota: A  
Short Russian Novel, Leningrad (written in collaboration with Michael  
Davidson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten), The Cell, The Cold of  
Poetry, and A Border Comedy; the University of California Press  
published a collection of her essays entitled The Language of Inquiry.  
Translations of her work have been published in France, Spain, Japan,  
Italy, Russia, Sweden, and Finland. She is the recipient of a Writing  
Fellowship from the California Arts Council, a grant from the Poetry  
Fund, and a Translation Fellowship (for her Russian translations) from  
the National Endowment for the Arts; she was awarded an Award for  
Independent Literature by the Soviet literary organization “Poetics  
Function” in Leningrad in 1989. She has travelled and lectured  
extensively in Russia as well as Europe, and Description and Xenia,  
two volumes of her translations from the work of the contemporary  
Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, have been published by Sun and  
Moon Press. From 1976 - 1984, Hejinian was the editor of Tuumba Press  
and from 1981 to 1999 she was the co-editor (with Barrett Watten) of  
Poetics Journal. She is also the co-director (with Travis Ortiz) of  
Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre  
work by poets; Atelos was nominated as one of the best independent  
literary presses by the Firecracker Awards in 2001. Other  
collaborative projects include a work entitled The Eye of Enduring  
undertaken with the painter Diane Andrews Hall and exhibited in 1996,  
a composition entitled Qúê Trân with music by John Zorn and text by  
Hejinian, a mixed media book entitled The Traveler and the Hill and  
the Hill created with the painter Emilie Clark (Granary Press, 1998),  
and the experimental film Letters Not About Love, directed by Jacki  
Ochs, for which Hejinian and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko wrote the script.  
In the fall of 2000, she was elected the sixty-sixth Fellow of the  
Academy of American Poets. She teaches at the University of  
California, Berkeley.



And here is a link to the recordings of Hejinian archived by pennsound:

  http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Hejinian.php



And finally here offers a short essay by Hejinian on closure: http://www.jacketmagazine.com/14/hejinian.html



In a few days I will circulate the minutes for our recent intense  
discussion of Charles Reznikoff’s testimony.





More, soon—

Richard Deming, Co-coordinator
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